IT Employment

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Support Contract Formula

Ive been running around as a IT consultant for SME's for several years now and have been doing quite well. Many of my clients have grown in size from when i started with them and a few have asked for a standardised support contact for a monthly fee as appossed to an hourly rate ad hoc.

Im in a position to offer this to them - the relationship is good but i need a way to caluclate how much to charge them. The obvious answer is to look at the previous years billing and calc from that but what if they keep expanding and gettting more equip and software to support?

Does anyone have a formula i could use to calculate this based on a per seat basis for workstations, servers and periferals? Maybe eventaking into account the number of apps on a machine?

I have found a few on the web but they are for larger companies and do not really suit.

All Comments

Set the boundaries

1. Software and applications currently installed and in use;2. Equipment currently installed or in the planning;3. Estimated time of support utilized based upon historical usage data.

If you can define in your contract settings that you will support 5 different software packages and 3 different proprietary applications running in a Windows XP Pro environment on 38 client computers and 4 Network servers, and you are estimating (to yourself) that this will take you a total of 20 hours support per week (average), then you set those datum up as your contractual boundaries.

You can also include certain specific clauses anticipating growth (i.e. if you select a new software accounting package, you agree to pay x% amount of the classes required for me to support you, you buy 10 new computers, then the charge increases by $x per computer, etc....). You should also ensure that there is a clause whereby an unanticipated change to support requirements will need to be addressed by an amendment to the contract.

I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for, however, it may be a good basis to start.

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